On February 28th, 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson figured out that DNA had a double-helix structure by creating a model out of bits of stuff in the lab and comparing it to X-ray diffraction data collected by X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and molecular biologist Maurice Wilkins. It was a discovery to write home about, and on March 19th, Crick did just that, sending a letter to his 12-year-old son Michael (who was not actually home at the time but rather in boarding school) describing their model, the double-helix sugar-phosphate backbone zipped together with basepairs of guanine and cytosine, adenine and thymine.

This letter, written more than a month before Watson and Crick published their first paper in the April 25th, 1953, issue of the journal Nature, contains the first written description of DNA as a “code” that is replicated. In addition to marking a watershed moment in the history of science, it’s a model of clarity and science writing for a popular audience that I think should be included in every school science textbook published. It’s also really sweet in a my-dad-is-a-serious-scientist sort of way.

My Dear Michael,

Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery. We have built a model for the structure of des-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid (read it carefully) called D.N.A. for short. You may remember that the genes of the chromosomes — which carry the hereditary factors — are made up of protein and D.N.A.

Our structure is very beautiful. D.N.A. can be thought of roughly as a very long chain with flat bits sticking out. The flat bits are called the “bases”. […]

Now we have two of these chains winding round each other — each one is a helix — and the chain, made up of sugar and phosphorus, is on the outside, and the bases are all on the inside. […]

Now the exciting thing is that while these are 4 different bases, we find we can only put certain pairs of them together. The bases have names. They are Adenine, Guanine, Thymine & Cytosine. I will call them A, G, T and C. Now we find that the pairs we can make — which have one base from one chain joined to one base from another — are only A with T and G with C.

Now on one chain, as far as we can see, one can have the bases in any order, but if their order is fixed, then the order on the other chain is also fixed. […]

It is like a code. If you are given one set of letters you can write down the others.

Now we believe that the D.N.A. is a code. That is, the order of the bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page of print is different from another). You can now see how Nature makes copies of the genes. Because if the two chains unwind into two separate chains, and if each chain then makes another chain come together on it, then because A always goes with T, and G with C, we shall two copies where we had one before. […]

In other words, we think we have found the basic copying mechanism by which life comes from life. The beauty of our model is that the shape of it is such that only these pairs can go together, though they could pair up in other ways if they were floating about freely. You can understand that we are very excited. We have to have a letter off to Nature in a day or so. Read this carefully so that you understand it. When you come home we will show you the model.

Lots of love,
Daddy

I’ve snipped out the hand-drawn illustrations, but you can read a transcript of the full letter with the diagrams included here. Crick’s handwriting is very legible so you can easily read the full letter with diagrams in the pictures below.

Michael did what his father told him to do and read the letter carefully over and over again. He was sick with the flu and confined to quarters, so he had plenty of time on his own to reread it and memorize “des-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid” and grasp how the code could be copied.

The little boy is 72 now and kept the letter for 60 years. He put it up for auction this year, the 60th anniversary of its writing, because it was idling away in storage along with Francis Crick’s Nobel Prize, which Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins (Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958 and prizes are not awarded posthumously), received in 1962 after the immense significance of their discovery became clear. Michael and his family decided it was time to let go of these precious milestones in the history of science. The proceeds would be split, with 20% from the sale of the medal going to the Francis Crick Institute in London and 50% from the sale of the letter going to the Salk Institute in La Jolla which employed Crick for 27 years after his mandatory retirement from the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, the laboratory where Watson and Crick made the double-helix model.

On April 10th, 2013, the letter sold at a Christie’s auction in New York for $5.3 million, $6,059,750 including buyer’s premium. This is a world record price for a letter sold at public auction. The buyer has chosen to remain anonymous, surprise, surprise. I hope he’s willing to lend it to institutions for exhibition.

Crick’s Nobel prize medal and diploma were sold by Heritage Auctions on April 11th. They were bought for $2,270,500 by Jack Wang, CEO of a Shanghai-based biomedical firm who plans to display them to encourage the company’s scientists to reach great research heights.

The original model of the double-helix made by Crick and Watson was dismantled, but in 1973 it was recreated using many of the original metal plates representing the bases. The reconstructed model is now part of the permanent collection of London’s Science Museum.

Last year’s hugely successful Indiegogo campaign to raise $850,000 for the nonprofit Tesla Science Center to build a museum dedicated to the genius inventor Nikola Tesla at his Wardenclyffe laboratory in Shoreham, New York, has borne fruit. The 15.69-acre laboratory site and all its buildings are no longer the property of Belgian multinational Agfa. As of May 2nd, the last laboratory of Nikola Tesla still standing anywhere in the world officially belongs to the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe (TSCW). Agfa, who put the property up for sale for $1.6 million and was reportedly entertaining an offer from real estate developers to demolish the historic structures and build condos on the site, now says via its North American general counsel Christopher Santomassimo that it “is proud to be associated, albeit in a small way, with this historic event.”

It took two decades of unrelenting effort from the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe to pay Agfa off so this historic event could take place. New York State had offered matching funds to make the purchase, so the TSCW needed to come up with $850,000 to meet Agfa’s asking price. When they found out that an interested developer was looming on the horizon last summer, they kicked off a public fundraising campaign. Matthew Inman of the massively popular website The Oatmeal, an avowed Tesla fan, got involved. He started an Indiegogo fundraiser entitled “Operation Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum,” offered extensive donation incentives and promoted the campaign heavily on his high-traffic site. Within a week, the campaign raised a million dollars. The final tally was $1,370,000.

It’s been almost nine months since then. Finally owning the property is a major milestone for the Tesla Science Center, but they don’t have time to rest on their laurels because the buildings are dilapidated, the grounds a wilderness and it’s going to take a great deal more money and time to convert this former Superfund hazardous waste site into a museum.

The TSCW has ambitious plans. They want to take advantage of the complex to create a museum about Tesla and his work, a hands-on science learning center where workshops will be held for inventors, a replica of the 187-foot power tower which was destroyed by the government in 1917 and, perhaps the coolest idea of them all, a physics-themed playground. The estimated cost to make this vision a reality is $10,000,000. The extra $520,000 raised on Indiegogo on top of the $850,000 used for the purchase gives them a little breathing room to get cleanup started, but isn’t even a dent on the total costs for the creation of the museum.

They’re not wasting any time doing what they can do, though. They’s already begun to board up the buildings to keep destructive human and animal elements out. Next on the agenda is a thorough assessment of their condition. Not all buildings can be saved, which is fine because many of them were built after Tesla sold the lab in 1915. The ones that are structurally viable will be restored and integrated into the design of the museum. The rest will be demolished.

Clean-up and construction will take an estimated five years. The TSCW plans to further fundraising to raise the $10 million. They expect corporate donors to provide the bulk of the amount, although considering that the Veronica Mars movie raised a record-breaking $5 million on Kickstarter, who knows what might be accomplished with crowdfunding these days?

Here’s video of the press conference announcing the purchase held at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, where Tesla spent the last ten years of his life in Suite 3327 feeding pigeons and meeting the occasional dignitary. He died there on January 7th, 1943.

The video includes talks from the “Angel Investors,” three people who donated key large amounts that helped the campaign meet its goals. The first to speak around the 15 minute mark is Joe Sikorski, a filmmaker who shot a Tesla documentary Fragments from Olympus and is working on a second documentary called Tower to the People about the inventor’s Wardenclyffe laboratory. The Sikorskis donated $33,000, all their seed money for the film, to the fundraising campaign. That was the donation that took them over the top to the $850,000 necessary to secure matching funds.

Next around the 20 minute mark is a great talk from Greg and Meredith Tally of the Best Western Denver Southwest who are awesomely turning the hotel into a paleontologically correct dinosaur resort. Big fans of Tesla and science boosters in general, they donated $35,000 to the Indiegogo campaign, which earned them a custom comic by Matthew Inman dedicated to the greatness that is the Dino hotel. They have a great bit describing Tesla’s laboratory in Colorado.

The last Angel is venture capitalist Dusan Stojanovic who gives an animated, passionate speech at the 26 minute mark encouraging wealthy companies to “put some cash into the future.” He is actually distantly related to Tesla. He shows his family tree and the piles of Tesla cousins that include his little branch. He will plans to put that kickass family tree online as part of the museum project.

He’s not the only Tesla relative to speak at the press conference. William Turbo, Tesla’s great grandnephew (his grandmother was Nikola Tesla’s sister) who knew him personally speaks around the 44 minute mark. He’s the Executive Secretary of the Tesla Memorial Society and notes there’s been a marked spike in interest in the inventor who was famous until his death but then faded into relative obscurity.

Archaeologists from the LAMAR Institute (the research organization that also played a pivotal role in the discovery of the Civil War prison Camp Lawton) have found the location of a small frontier fort which was the site of a significant Revolutionary War skirmish in Wilkes County, east central Georgia.

This was an incredible long shot. There are no contemporary maps pinpointing its location, only a few vague landmark descriptions in the primary sources. Researchers and surveyors identified about a dozen potential sites inside a search area of 2,700 wooded acres. With a limit budget funded by grants from the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, Kettle Creek Battlefield Association, and the LAMAR Institute, a team of six people had one month to scour this vast area with metal detectors looking for remains of the fort and battlefield.

After a month of searching turned up more than a dozen 18th century settlements but no fort and no battlefield, they hit paydirt in the form of musket balls literally on the last hour of the last day of the project. With no money left in the budget to keep going, the team all volunteered to return for a few more days to find more evidence that they’d discovered Carr’s Fort. They unearthed a dozen fired musket balls, musket parts and hundreds of iron and brass artifacts from decorative scrollwork to horseshoes, buttons, door hinges and old frying pans.

This was not the engineered military fortification you think of when you think of forts. Robert Carr was a cattle farmer and captain in the Georgia Patriot militia. Part of his duties as a militia captain was to create a safe shelter for his men and their families should they find themselves under attack by Loyalists or hostile Native Americans. He built a stockade around his home and several outbuildings making a space the size of a tennis court where about 300 people could find some protection from enemy incursions. That’s Carr’s Fort.

There were more than 30 militia forts along the Wilkes County frontier during the Revolutionary War. This is the first one to have been found archaeologically. Modest though it may have been, this fort and the other frontier forts like it were strategic keys to holding Georgia.

Savannah had been captured by British troops under Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell on December 29, 1778, an important victory for the British who were trying to reclaim the prodigal South in the wake of their failures in the North. In January, Campbell and his men were sent north to Augusta to recruit Loyalist militia. He met with limited success — many of the so-called Loyalists he signed never actually got around to forming militia companies — but Colonel John Boyd, who Campbell had sent on a recruiting mission to North and South Carolina, was able to recruit almost 800 Loyalists in his journey to and back from the Carolinas.

In response to the loss of Savannah, the Continental Army, chronically short of funds and manpower, had managed to scrounge up about 1,500 Patriot militiamen camped on both the Georgia and South Carolina banks of the Savannah River near Augusta. Under the command of Colonel Andrew Pickens, the militias went on the offensive, attacking Campbells’ camp just outside Augusta. They arrived to find it empty, however. The British were on an extended patrol. Pickens sent most of his men after them but directed a group of 250 men to Carr’s Fort just in case the Loyalists were planning on trying any funny business there.

Pickens’ instincts (or intelligence) was spot-on. A troop of 80 Loyalists led by Campbell had occupied Carr’s Fort, but since the Georgia and South Carolina militia was hot on their heals, they had been forced to leave their horses and baggage train outside of the stockade walls. On February 10, 1779, the Patriot militia besieged the fort and a very short, very intense battle ensued. They exchanged fire for several hours leaving more than a dozen dead and wounded on each side.

It only ended because Pickens found out that Boyd’s 800 Loyalists were headed for Georgia from South Carolina, so he ordered the siege lifted and went to intercept Boyd. The Patriots took the Loyalist horses and baggage with them. Stranded without transportation or supplies, Campbell’s detachment left Carr’s Fort and marched back to Savannah to rejoin the main garrison. Pickens intercepted Boyd four days later on Valentine’s Day near Kettle Creek. The Patriots won. Boyd was mortally wounded and most of his troops were captured, wounded, killed or fled. About 250 of Boyd’s militia would eventually join up with Campbell’s forces.

Captain Carr, who may or may not have been present when the fort was besieged (the sources on the battle don’t mention him at all), was killed a few weeks later at his home by Loyalist Creek Indians who burned down the fort. His his wife and children were able to escape.

The artifacts recovered from the Carr’s Fort site are being cleaned. When that’s done, they will be given to University of Georgia. Daniel Elliott, President of the LAMAR Institute, says researchers are still looking for any remains of the stockade wall that may have survived the conflagration.